The good fight

By Deauwand Myers

"Liberal." American conservatives have done a good job of making that word seem highly problematic, particularly in the political sphere. Say what you want about Republicans and the American Right, they are adept at vitriol and demonization of the opposition, and they fight for their ideology with a vigor Democrats and much of the Left often do not.

One reason there is not as much of an appreciation for "liberalism" as there should be in American politics is this: Americans aren't good at history. Civics and American history are not taught well throughout secondary education, and so many people actually think much of what we take for granted in our government and our daily lives magically arrived, or was always present.

The gradual and steady diminishing of unions is a good place to start. Where did unions come from? Not the union fairy. After the Industrial Revolution and Civil War, labor in the United States wasn't good. The Gilded Age of the late 1800s, a term coined by the inimitable Mark Twain, exemplified both American economic expansion and rising labor wages with an increased and yawning wealth gap between workers and the über rich.

All this economic expansion came with almost no governmental regulation. Child labor, long working hours with few or no breaks, unpaid overtime, unsafe working conditions, and of course, lots of discrimination against new European immigrants from "undesirable" countries, the colored and women abounded.

Unions formed to combat some of this. (Opponents of labor reform effectively used race as a wedge issue to pit working class whites against other working class racial minorities. This is one reason why unions in most of Western Europe and some Asian countries are much stronger than they are in America, to the detriment of wages and working conditions, which could have otherwise been better had unions been larger and more unified throughout their existence).

Unions sought to raise social awareness about the labor conditions (and affect meaningful change) fueling the fabulous wealth of the so called "robber barons." Henry Flagler, J. P. Morgan, Henry H. Rogers, Andrew Mellon, John Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Henry Frick, Andrew Carnegie are all examples.

Unions greatly benefitted from the very wealthy President Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, who signed into law the Wagner Act, explicitly protecting unions' rights to organize.

While Republicans and conservatives fought against these and much of the New Deal created by FDR, (things such as Social Security, which is one of the most successful social welfare programs in human history, lifting the vast majority of the elderly poor out of poverty), liberals championed those causes, just as they did Women's Suffrage prior to Roosevelt's unprecedented four terms in office.

The five-day work week, workmen's compensation for injuries on the job, workplace safety regulations, minimum age requirements for employment, the minimum wage, equal employment practices enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), (created in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, yes, another Democrat), as well as a bevy of other labor gains for the common worker were put into effect by unions, Democrats, liberals, and likeminded individuals.

Recently, American conservatives have tried to (and in some cases, successfully) inject ideology into the classroom on issues like science (arguing for the teaching of creationism as a legitimate scientific theory) and history (downplaying challenges in American history, like the land theft and genocide of indigenous peoples, slavery, lynching, and the Civil Rights movement).

Instead of confronting, exploring, and admitting these historical challenges, too many conservatives wish to whitewash American history, or at least downplay all the negative aspects thereof, much like the right-wing Japanese bloc attempts to do in Japan, rightfully earning the anger of Korea and China, amongst other Asian countries negatively affected by Imperialist Japan.

There's something else conservatives attempt to do in this revision of the 19th and 20th centuries. They wish to ameliorate the shame and guilt of conservatives consistently being on the wrong side of history.

If Dr. King was right, and the arc of history truly does bend towards history, conservatives have been the social gravity bending that arc, impeding its trajectory toward a more perfect union. Conservatives, in various forms and in both parties (although usually Republicans, particularly after 1965) were against every social justice movement since abolition: women's suffrage, workers' rights, environmental protection, women's, civil, sexual minorities,' and voting rights.

And so, as the presidential election season kicks off, liberals and Democrats should remind the voting public about their very long list of accomplishments that have empirically improved the lives of many Americans. Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, the aforementioned labor gains, CHIP (children's healthcare), women's reproductive rights, among so many other programs and meaningful legislative triumphs have occurred because of the left and in spite of concerted and vehement conservative opposition.

The left fights the good fight.

Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.co m.